FSFE Newsletter - September 2017

Public Money? Public Code!

Digital services offered and used by our public administrations are part of the critical infrastructure of 21st century democratic nations. Due to restrictive software licences, however, many public bodies do not have full control over their digital infrastructure. Although publishing publicly funded software under a free licence generates great benefits for governments and civil society, policy makers are still reluctant to improve legislation in this area. It is time to change this. At the FSFE, we want European legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for public sector must be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well!

To push our demand, the FSFE launched a new campaign last week: "Public Money Public Code". The campaign explains the benefits of releasing publicly funded Software under free licences with a short inspiring video and an open letter to sign. Furthermore, the campaign and the open letter will be used in the coming months until the European Parliament election in 2019 to highlight good and bad examples of publicly funded software development and its potential reuse.

Initial success was overwhelming. The campaign launch was covered by many websites and news magazines over Europe. At the time of writing, the Open Letter is already signed by more than 35 organisations and more than 5000 individuals. Various politicians and other prominent people have publicly announced their support of the campaign, including Edward Snowden, President of Freedom of the Press Foundation:

FSFE publishes Software Licensing Best Practices

If you want others to be able to use your code, you have to include a licence, and as a best practice you should do so in a way which can be understood by humans and computers alike. Unfortunately, endless software projects and code snippets are available in the open but still lack a proper licence. One potential reason is that attaching a licence to software - properly and in a way that is understandable - can be challenging. Making sure computers understand your licence is even more difficult.

What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE

The proposed European Copyright Directive restricts the rights of developers and internet users, creating barriers for the development of source code. Together with Open Forum Europe, the FSFE wrote a white paper to help people understand the full view of the matter at stake from a software developer point of view. We will launch a campaign later this month but you can already help us to raise awareness by sharing Save Code Share widely.

The "Koalition Freies Wissen" ("Free Knowledge Coalition") created the "Digital-O-Mat", an online tool for voter information for the German federal elections on September 24th, 2017. The Digital-O-Mat (German) highlights the parties' positions on topics relavant to internet policy like Free Software and helps voters find their most matching party for the election to the German parliament.

The FSFE country team Germany sent "Ask Your Candidates" questions to participating parties of the Bundestagswahl (the German federal elections) and published and analysed their answers. (German)

The FSFE country team Netherlands was present with a village at SHA Camp, a non-profit hacker-camp in the Netherlands. For five days, this village offered a public space to discuss, meet, hack, sing-along, and find shelter. The FSFE had its own curated track and the village offered multiple self-organized sessions, from a Free Software Song choir to a FreedomBox install fest.

In April this year, the Digital Society Institute hosted a workshop to analyse "How secure is free software? Security record of open source and free software." The workshop included contributions from Matthias Kirschner and is now available in English and German including recommendations for the private and public sector.

We are happy to welcome three new interns: Carmen Bianca Bakker, Kristi Progri and Erik Da Silva. If you are interested in doing an internship with us, find more information on our pages.

We have a new item in the FSFE online shop: a non-binary pink bib with the slogan "I am a fork" stitched onto the bib. Organic and fair trade.

The FSFE village during SHA Camp 2017 in the Netherlands.

Do not miss it! Upcoming events with the FSFE

CopyCamp in Warsaw will be happening on 28 - 29 of September. CopyCamp is a conference that focuses on the question of how exclusive immaterial rights affect culture, education, science, technology, and Free Software. Matthias Kirschner will speak about "Limux: the loss of a lighthouse" and our policy analyst Polina Malaja about the upcoming "EU copyright reform and its implications for collaborative software development." The conference has no admission fee, but participants are asked to register before attending. Thanks to the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation, there are travel grants available for German residents (not only citizens), funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.

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